Review: ‘Suspiria’ Is a Gaudy Freakout of Female Violence

Smeared in red and wrapped in woo-woo mystery, “Suspiria” is a fable of demonic possession. In storybook terms, its bad, bad trouble involves a young, outwardly naïve American dancer, Susie (Dakota Johnson), whose tenure at an all-female school in Germany turns progressively strange. The other less interesting possession involves the Italian director Luca Guadagnino, who has taken a 1970s freakout from Dario Argento and turned it into a bloated fantasy of violently consuming female power. It’s the old vagina dentata scare show, this time fancied up with art-house pretensions.

With its garish color, canted angles and baroque violence, the first “Suspiria” is still adept at unsettling your equilibrium, which is fitting for a film that renders psychosis into visual style. (Among its most memorable elements is a fantastically creepy soundtrack, which turns music-box tinkling into a maddening refrain.) Argento’s vulgar expressionism must have appealed to Guadagnino. A cinematic sensualist, Guadagnino (“Call Me by Your Name”) makes stories filled with volcanic emotions, pretty people and ravishing backdrops that — with color and light and technique — he imbues with a sumptuous tactility you almost reach for, as if to caress.

This time, he seems more interested in making you recoil while also saying Something. What precisely he wants to say amid all the carefully choreographed bloodletting and disembowelment chic is unclear, other than some women are beautiful and erotically beguiling but also mysterious and murderous. (It’s a story women know by heart and is dustier than even Argento’s shocker.) Also: Tilda Swinton can do — and wear — anything, including a long curtain of hair and a prosthetic penis. Mostly, the new “Suspiria” is an exercise in grindhouse genre, a seeming departure for a director whose work is usually, at times to its detriment, calibrated for art-house consumption.

[Read our interview with Luca Guadagnino and Tilda Swinton.]

Written by David Kajganich, the new “Suspiria” follows the general sweep of the first one, opening on a murky, stormy note. It’s 1977 (the year Argento’s film was released), and Patricia (Chloë Grace Moretz), an American who studies at the Helena Markos Dance Company in West Berlin, is having a meltdown. Fleeing to her therapist, Dr. Josef Klemperer (Swinton, swaddled in latex and old-world gentlemen’s clothing), Patricia ominously babbles while she jumps around the shrink’s office and he dutifully scratches down his notes. She seems unhinged, rattled, and is soon conveniently gone from the scene, though only after leaving a bag and a notebook filled with cryptic musings.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.